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CREATED:20130516T223400Z
DESCRIPTION:Since 1999 the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival has provided
a forum for sex worker film and video makers to screen works about sex
workers and sex work, businesses, industries and trades around the world.
The Festival has expanded to become a vibrant venue for performances,
workshops, visual arts, political organizing, skills sharing and ever
expanding events. The Sex Worker Festival recognizes and honors
prostitutes, dancers, porn performers and other sex workers from diverse
communities, who have been dynamic and integral members of arts communities
since time immemorial.\n\nPerformance and Parties\n\nTheWhoreCast LIVE!
Siouxsie Q brings sex worker stories, art, and voices this time LIVE and in
person to kick off the Fest at the Center for Sex & Culture featuring
Cinnamon Maxxine, James Darling and Courtney Trouble.The WhoreCast Trivia
game and lots of surprises in this interactive live show. \n\nBack by
popular demand, San Francisco's "Musical Comedy Cabaret Porn Star" and
award-winning lyricist Tom Orr presents Love For $ale redux, "Hooker with a
Heart of Gold" featuring music, burlesque, and performance art via hooker
showtunes in this a benefit for the St. James Infirmary, the sex worker
occupational health clinic in San Francisco.\n\nPerformance curator and
international multi-media artist Mariko Passion brings her "Whorrific
Popcorn Theater Bus and Cabaret," as storytellers and performers including
Ckiara Rose, Absinthia Scarlot Harlot and Femme 6 take riders on a magical
adventure with a Happy Ending!\n\nThe 8th Biennial Sex Worker Fest welcomes
Amber Dawn (author of Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa) launching her
new work "How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustlers Memoir" on Thursday, May
23rd at "Oral Sarvices," an evening of spoken word with Brontez Purnell,
Juba Kalamka, Rhiannon Argo (2009 Lambda Award winnder), Laure McElroy,
Ckiara Rose, Lola Sunshine, Jacques La Femme, Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in
Her Own Words and folks from MNRC/POOR Magazine workshop.\n\nSpecial
Events\n\nThe Sex Worker Festival again presents "Whores' Bath," a spa and
magical healing event for sex workers in San Francisco, "reclaiming our
roles as healers." "Whores' Bath," was created by Festival co-producer,
Erica Fabulous."Whores' Bath" contributes to the 21st century lexicon with
a new entry in the Urban Dictionary.
(www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=whores%20bath)\n\nWorkshops\n\nIn
2013 the Festival launches a 4 day series of workshops, "Privilege,
Oppression, and InterseXionality," for sex workers and allies in
conjunction with Rhizome Consulting Project. Join us for this "mind and
heart opening" workshop series as we deepen our awareness of
class/race/gender and how they overlap and intersect.\nAmber Dawn will be
among those offering workshops at the Institute of Sex Workology on Friday
on May 24th at the Center for Sex & Culture. Amber Dawn's workshop
"Tough Language and Tender Wisdoms" is sex workers only but most, including
Alice in Bondage Land, The Incredible Edible Akynos, Mission SRO
Collaborative's "Housing Justice Framework & Sex Worker Rights" are
open to all. Please check the schedule TBA re: admission policies for each
workshop.\n\nThe Festival is proud to welcome activist and artist Emi
Koyama. Focusing on the carceral state, Koyama's recent zine, "State
Violence, Sex Trade, and the Failure of Anti-Trafficking Policies," was
developed from her extensive research, documenting of false premises within
the U.S. domestic anti-sex trafficking movement and the alignment with the
fundamentalist Christian right. The evening also includes a selection of
video clips from "Collateral Damage: Sex Workers and the Anti-Trafficking
Campaigns," "Normal- Real Stories from The Sex Industry," " Last Rescue in
Siam" by Empower and more.\n\nSex Worker Sinema at the 8th Biennial San
Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival, curated by Laure
McElroy\n\nSummary\n\nThe San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Art Festival,
as always, focuses on the lives, the art, and the struggle for workers' and
human rights of people employed in sex work industries. The festival
strives to maintain a forum for diverse voices, including youth, sex
workers of color, migrant sex workers; sex workers' rights organizations
around the world, queer and trans sex workers, sex worker artists, saints,
heros and she-ros, and sex workers both within and outside the borders of
the United States. Films and topics address the impact of trafficking
policy and discourse on sex workers; sex work as a labor issue on the
international agenda; sex work and gender identities, sex education, sex
art, porn, fetish culture and erotica, as well as portraits of strippers,
prostitutes, doms, madams and much more.\n\nLot Lizard\n\nThe festival lens
has always ranged far and wide around the world; this year two of our
dearest feature films draw the viewer back to the gritty strolls of these
United States.\n\nDirector Alexander Perlman brings us "Lot Lizard" (for
those who are unfamiliar with the term, a lot lizard is a prostitute who
works primarily at truckstops serving drivers). Inspired by a conversation
Perlman had in 2009 with a woman working out of the same truckstop he
happened to be hitchhiking, Perlman and his two person crew put together
200 hours of documentary footage over eight weeks of filming in 2010,
following a selection of sex workers as they ply their trade in a uniquely
American setting, including: Monica and Frank, the boyfriend with whom she
shares a room bordering the lot; Jennifer, a single mom who struggles to
walk away from sex work as a livelihood because it has become bound up for
her with drug addiction; Betty, who says, "I don't have to date if I don't
want to… but sometimes you have to," and makes no apologies about her
life on the lot. The street workers of "Lot Lizard" are by-and-large
working class and poor women who are engaged in what sex worker rights
movement terms "survival' sex work, that is, sex work that is performed as
a way to meet very basic needs of the worker, such as shelter or food or
medicating; these workers, in addition to dealing with the general
stigmatization of sex work, are arguably prone to more intense
criminalization due to the exposed (outdoors) nature of their work. Along
with criminalizing policies, agendas of "rescue" that silence the actual
voices of workers trying to communicate their own needs are heavily slanted
toward people engaged in survival sex work. "Lot Lizard" does not take any
easy ways out by simplifying the stories of the featured or making them
pithy; and although poverty and even desperation may at times inform their
work and their choices, there is in every story a clear element of
strength, of will and independence that transcends
victimhood.\n\n\nAmerican Courtesans\n\nSome people envision catty
strippers trash-talking each others' weight and ratting out co-workers to
management for crimes imagined or real for the prime stage time or just for
bitchy kicks; mainstream media throws up stereotypes of hookers pulling out
each others' weaves over status in the eyes of a pimp or "dibs" on a john;
what people do not see is the great affection and support that can exist
between workers in this oldest and arguably hardest of professions.
"American Courtesans", a feature film that is the culmination of a dream
project for filmmaker and escort Kristen DiAngelo, watches like a love and
acceptance letter from a sex worker to her sisterhood of fellow whores. In
line with a trend in sex worker cinema that festival producer Carol Leigh
identifies as arising out of the contemporary, ubiquitous genre of
intensely personal reality shows, the stories of the women featured in
"American Courtesans" begin at the beginning, where many of the women
featured relate a past of family or professional victimization, and pull
the viewer through the trauma and catharsis stories to bear witness to
eventual claiming of spaces of radical empowerment as whores.\n\n\n"Scarlet
Road" documents the specialized practice of Rachel Wotton, as she works
with differently abled clients , campaigning for both sex worker rights and
to increase awareness and access to sexual expression for people of varying
abilities. "Pay it no Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson,"
memorializes the woman who thew "the shotglass that was heard around the
world" in this tribute to sex worker and LGBT history, screening with
"Remembering The Living: Monica Forrester on Sister in Spirit and
Indigenous Sex Workers." "Ticket to Paradise" portrays the details of
women's choices in a small village in Thailand, to marry a foreigner or do
sex work in Pattaya.\n\nAn array of brilliant shorts include a new video
from Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers, "Global Sex Workers on the
March!," "A Kiss for Gabriela" by Laura Murray, "Whore Logic" by PJ Starr
featuring The Incredible Edible Akynos, "Stripper Damage" by Gina Gold,
"Sex Worker Open University 2011," "Transitioning Through Sex Work" by Jay
Very, "Nada" by Nada Felini and Christian Vega, "Creative Trafficking" by
Operation Snatch and many more.\n.\nFestival founder, Carol Leigh AKA
Scarlot Harlot says, "Sex workers have an excellent vantage point from
which to view social hypocrisy, expressed in many contexts--by the
lawmakers who use their services, then sponsor policies which further
criminalize them, to the wanna-be saviors who claim to 'rescue' but only
increase our vulnerability. This whores-eye-view of society is reflected in
this body of work by sex workers." \n
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/05/16/18736946.php
SUMMARY:8th Biennial San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival-May 18-26
LOCATION:Locations include Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission St, San
Francisco; Faithful Fools, 234 Hyde St, San Francisco; Hospitality House,
290 Turk St., San Francisco; Cal PEP, 2811 Adeline St., Oakland, St. James
Infirmary, 1372 Mission St, San Francisco;.
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/05/16/18736946.php
DTSTART:20130519T030000Z
DTEND:20130520T030000Z
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